Card Range To Study

109 Cards in this Set

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How did the artists make the big polaroids in the exhibition?

The 20x24 images are created with a special large format camera that is 5-feet (150 cm) high and weighs 235 pounds (106 kg). Developed to accurately reproduce works of art, especially paintings and tapestries, the camera was soon used as a creative tool to make original photographs.

SOURCE: http://www.polaroid.com/studio/20x24/index.html

Nancy Burson - themes

Since the inception of her career as an artist, Nancy Burson has been interested in the interaction of art and science. In the early 80s, it was Burson who introduced “ morphing”, a computer program that was able to create facial composites. Later her method came to be used by police departments to find missing children by “morphing” their faces to account for age change. The human face, its morphology, and its underlying genetic code are recurring themes in almost all of Burson’s works.

SOURCE: http://www.nancyburson.com/article_fr.html

Nancy Burson - Human Race Machine

Her Human Race Machine, which allows people to view themselves as a different race, was featured on Oprah in 2006. Currently there are Human Race Machines touring the U.S. college and university market, as a diversity tool that provides students with the profound visual experience of being another race.

SOURCE: http://www.nancyburson.com/state_fr.html

Jeffrey Silverthorne - bio

Silverthorne was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1946. A Breaux Bridge native, Silverthorne attended Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI.

Silverthorne does not shy away from working with the big issues of life, death, religion, the beautiful and the grotesque. Through the use of montage, studio setups, including the use of projection he juxtaposes objects and images to create complex layers.

Christian Boltanski (born September 6, 1944) is a French photographer, sculptor, self-proclaimed painter, and installation artist.

Christian Boltanski was born in Paris to a Jewish father of Ukrainian heritage, and a Corsican mother. He spent the early years of his life hiding from the Nazis.

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Boltanski

In what year was the Polaroid Coporation Formed?

In 1937, the Polaroid Coporation was founded.

SOURCE: 50 years of Polaroid

When were 3-D glasses invented?

3-D Glasses were invented in 1951, and polarizing filters on projects make possible the first color stereoscopic 3-D movie!!!

SOURCE: 50 years of Polaroid

Who invented the first self-contained identification system?

ID-2 Land Identification system: was the first self contained identification system using instant photography!!

SOURCE:50 years of Polaroid

What is Polavision?

Polavision in 1978 was a instant color motion picture system that was invented!!

SOURCE: 50 years of Polaroid

Polaroid's Pocket Instant Camera

This camera, first introduced in Japan, by the Japanese company Tony, as the Xiao camera, was the world's smallest instant camera in 1998! Single use instant camera with compact film format is introduced.

SOURCE: 50 years of Polaroid

Christian Boltanski - themes

His artistic work is haunted by the problems of death, memory and loss; he often seeks to memorialize the anonymous and those who have disappeared.

SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Boltanski

Christian Boltanski - materials

Several of Boltanski's projects have used actual lost property from public spaces, such as railway stations, creating collections which memorialise the unknown owners in the cacophony of personal effects.

Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue2/boltanski.htm

Gottfried Helnwein - themes

Helnwein is concerned primarily with psychological and sociological anxiety, historical issues and political topics. As a result of this, his work is often considered provocative and controversial.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Helnwein

Gottfried Helnwein - themes (expanded)

His subject matter is the human condition. The metaphor for his art, although it included self-portraits, is dominated by the image of the child, but not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein instead created the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child scarred emotionally from within.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Helnwein

Gottfried Helnwein - role as artist

William Burroughs said of Helnwein:
"It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know that he knows. Helnwein is a master of surprised recognition."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Helnwein

Jim Goldberg - personal philosophy

"My work is based in trust. I don't work well just snapping pictures, although some people would say the opposite. I really feel like intimacy and trust are the guide to my work."

series of portraits, each page containing notes handwritten by the person in the photograph, expressing their emotions or reactions to being confronted with their own image. This juxtaposition of the two ends of the social ladder is a careful investigation of the American myth, but also an innovative exploration of how to portray an individual in the fullest, circular sense, beginning from the outward appearance and passing through to the inner thoughts of the person represented.

Adams has spent most of his time recently in the Lost Creek area of Kentucky, where he photographed the more contemporary aspects of his subjects’ living standards. Satellite dishes are seen throughout the images, though sometimes they are serving secondary functions such as a canopy for farm animals. Trailer homes are used for business and living purposes and recreational vehicles - four wheelers - are used instead of horses to travel through the mountains. These Appalachian residents are also wearing more trendy name brand clothing such as LA Gear, Nike, and Levi’s, and t-shirts with designer logos.

Adams usually spends a lot of time with his subjects, talking for hours, eating dinner with them, helping to build new roofs or other labor tasks. He always gives the families Polaroids of the pictures he takes and when he returns the next year, he gives them 8 x 10 prints.

Every summer, traveling through the mountains photographing, I am somehow able to renew and relive my childhood. I regain my southern, mountain accent and approach my people with openness, facination, and respect; and they treat me with respect. My psychic antennae become sharpened and acute. I love these people, perhaps that is it, plain and simple. I respond to the sensual beauty of a hardened face with many scars, the deeply etched lines and flickers of sweat containing bright spots of sunlight. The eyes of my subjects reveal a kindness and curiosity, and their acceptance of me is gratifying. For me, this is rejuvenation of the spirit of time past, and I am better for the experience each time it happens. These portraits are, in a way, self-portraits that represent a long autobiographical exploration of creativity, imagination, vision, repulsion and salvation. My greatest fear as a photographer is to look into the eyes of my subject and not see my own reflection.

My work has been an artist search for a deeper understanding of my heritage and myself, using photography as a medium and the Appalachian people as collaborators with their own desires to communicate. I hope, too, that viewers, will see in these photographs something of the abiding strength and resourcefulness and dignity of the mountain people.

http://shelby-lee-adams.blogspot.com/

Dawoud Bey - themes

Bey is interested in the portrait as a site of psychological and emotional engagement between the photographer and his model. The multiple panels of Bey’s signature style [...] allow him to capture momentary changes in expression, fleeting gestures, and the subtle articulations of personality.

Source: http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/bey_dawoud.php

Dawoud Bey - themes (expanded)

Since the mid-1990s, Dawoud Bey has created personal, intimate, and engaging portraits of young people that thwart stereotypical representations of urban youth.[...] Through his portraits, Bey seeks to draw attention to the relationship between the artist, subject, and viewer, underscoring the power of the sitter's gaze to engage, confront, or avoid the viewer.
He uses a 20-by-24-inch Polaroid to photograph parts of the sitter, then reassembles the fragmented portrait: the resulting image has a sense of energetic transition. Bey has said that he chooses to photograph teenagers because, "My interest in young people has to do with the fact that they are the arbiters of style in the community; their appearance speaks most strongly of how a community of people defines themselves at a particular historical moment."

Carey is not a painter, but a gifted photographer who has experimented with Polaroid materials for 25 years and stretched the uses of Polaroid's 20X24 Camera for over a decade. She explores the "insides" of the camera and lays bare the processes of photographic imagery while pushing the boundaries of its possibilities.

Source: http://www.polaroid.com/studio/artists/carey/index.html

Ellen Carey - themes

Such is the inherent contradiction of minimalist photography and the wonder of Ellen Carey's work - that in exposing the physical nature of the medium itself, the resulting image becomes something altogether foreign, bearing almost no resemblance to what we traditionally consider to be a photograph.

Source: http://www.ellencarey.com/work/entryframes.html

Ellen Carey - themes

Ellen Carey’s photographs investigate abstraction and minimalism through the use of highly saturated color and pure form. This untitled grid of vibrant patterns and shapes, both figurative and abstract, creates a conceptual collage. This multi-paneled piece is intended, Carey says, to ”represent a departure from the picture-as-sign idea of photography, as well as from the historical and cultural expectation that photographs will describe, document, and narrate.”

Source:
http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/carey_ellen.php

Eileen Cowin - themes

Cowin makes photographic works that tell stories both through images and through image/text relationships. In looking at how her work has developed over the years, it becomes evident that she has moved from staging photographic tableaux to exploring how narrative is created. This is accomplished through the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate images that include single objects or focus on an expression.

With a skillful use of gesture and pose, Eileen Cowin creates mysterious, theatrical scenarios for the camera. Blending the ecclesiastical allegory of the fifteenth century, the romantic vision of the nineteenth century, and the Surrealist trends of the twentieth, Cowin draws inspiration from European painting. [...] Cowin reveals penchant for suspense and the recurring themes of privacy, victimization, and voyeurism.

Source:
http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/cowin_eileen.php

Robert Mapplethorpe - statement

Mapplethorpe told ARTnews in late 1988, “I don’t like that particular word ‘shocking.’ I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before…I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them.”

Source:
http://www.mapplethorpe.org/biography.html

Robert Mapplethorpe - purpose

Mapplethorpe produced a consistent body of work that strove for balance and perfection and established him in the top rank of twentieth-century artists. In 1987 he established the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research and finance projects in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection.

Source:
http://www.mapplethorpe.org/biography.html

Robert Mapplethorpe - on photography

“I never liked photography,” he is quoted as saying, “Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.”His first Polaroids were self-portraits and the first of a series of portraits of his close friend, the singer-artist-poet Patti Smith.

Source:
http://www.mapplethorpe.org/biography.html

William Wegman - subjects

In Los Angeles he got Man Ray, the first of his Weimaraners. Wegman was working in video and Man Ray kept getting into the act; eventually Wegman decided to make use of the dog. Since then almost all of his work has featured either Man Ray or one of the other Weimaraners who followed him (there is a 'family tree' on his website) after Wegman's move to New York.

Source:
http://photography.about.com/library/dop/bldop_wwegma.htm

William Wegman - in pop culture

Wegman's photos and videos have also appeared in books, advertisements, films, and on the television programs Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live.

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wegman_(photographer)

Lucas Samaras - media

In 1973 Samaras discovered that the wet dyes of Polaroid prints were highly malleable, allowing him to create what he calls "Photo-Transformations."

Born in Greece, Lucas Samaras immigrated to the United States in 1948 and became a citizen in 1955. He was a sculptor and experimental artist who created a very diverse portfolio. He was a part of Kaprow’s first happening in 1959. Around this time, he was creating figures out of plaster and rags. Then, in the 1960’s, Samaras began using nails and pins to construct his sculptures. He also made several studies in light and reflection. Samaras’s most famous works were a part of his 1970 series of Autopolaroids. These were photographs of his own anatomy and helped to solidify his reputation.

Source: http://wwar.com/masters/s/samaras-lucas.html

Judy Dater - process

Her stripped down
technology compliments the intensely personal images she makes, relying on her rapport with the
subject rather than special effects.

an American artist who became a central figure in the movement known as pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter; an avant-garde filmmaker, a record producer, an author and a public figure known for his presence in wildly diverse social circles that included bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy aristocrats.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol

Andy Warhol - persona

He was generally regarded as quiet, shy, and as a meticulous observer.

refused to comment on his work or to speak about himself (confining himself in interviews to responses like "Uhm, No" and "Uhm, Yes", and often allowing others to speak for him)

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol

Andy Warhol - photographic process

To produce his silkscreens, Warhol made photographs or had them made by his friends and assistants. These pictures were mostly taken with a specific model of Polaroid camera that Polaroid kept in production especially for Warhol. This photographic approach to painting and his snapshot method of taking pictures has had a great effect on artistic photography. Warhol was an accomplished photographer, and took an enormous amount of photographs of Factory visitors, friends - given the importance of this medium to both his paintings and to film, one might say that an interest in photography lies at the center of his artistic practice.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol

Anita Douthat - process

Douthat has been making photograms--images produced without a camera using objects that are placed directly onto light-sensitive paper and exposed to light. She is drawn to the process for its essential simplicity, its directness of means and its potential for limitless formal invention.

Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. While the Combines are both painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg has also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, performance, and a method of drawing known as solvent transfer.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rauschenberg

Robert Rauchenberg - current work

Throughout the '80s and '90s Rauschenberg continued his experimentation, concentrating primarily on collage and new ways to transfer photographs.

Almost all of Close’s work is based on the use of a grid as an underlying basis for the representation of an image. This simple but surprisingly versatile structure provides the means for "a creative process that could be interrupted repeatedly without…damaging the final product, in which the segmented structure was never intended to be disguised."

Source: http://www.chuckclose.coe.uh.edu/life/index.html

Chuck Close - career

The remarkable career of artist Chuck Close extends beyond his completed works of art. More than just a painter, photographer, and printmaker, Close is a builder who, in his words, builds "painting experiences for the viewer." Highly renowned as a painter, Close is also a master printmaker, who has, over the course of more than 30 years, pushed the boundaries of traditional printmaking in remarkable ways.

Source: www.chuckclose.coe.uh.edu/life/index.html

Chuck Close - subject

Close has developed a formal analysis and methodological reconfiguration of the human face that have radically changed the definition of modern portraiture.

Source: http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/1998/close/

Werner Hannappel - subject and process

These rough and sorry panoramas enable him to reveal a network of thin and essential signs, dissimulated in the natural elements. It emphasizes in its photographs the descriptive and graphic impact inherent at the nature, which it reinforces and underlines by the use of the black and white and the refusal of any anecdote.

When Werner Hannappel photographs the landscapes of the Far North or the West of France, it is to appreciate the structure of it interns, the space order subjacent with abstract chaos, its sculptural aspect retained or revealed by the objective. No mark of a cultural nature comes to recognize the place.

these invested places of an imposing and eternal loneliness, of a metaphysical dimension which seems to emanate from some ritual practices hidden in the age of the stones.

This sober and rigorous approach attached to the beauty melancholic person of the landscape rests on a transcendent vision of the nature/culture reports/ratios inherited the romantic tradition.

The step of these artists as that of Werner Hannappel carries in it an existential anguish related to the increasing loss of an authentic bond with the natural elements.

Source (translated): http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/tr

Ansel Adams - zone system

The zone system is a technique which allows photographers to translate the light they see into specific densities on negatives and paper, thus giving them better control over finished photographs.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansel_Adams

Ansel Adams - visualization

Adams also pioneered the idea of visualization (which he often called 'previsualization', though he later acknowledged that term to be a redundancy) of the finished print based upon the measured light values in the scene being photographed.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansel_Adams

Ansel Adams - bio/career

In the 1930s, Adams created a limited-edition book of his very own photography, leading him to believe in a world outside his own artistic nature. Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, as part of the Sierra Club's efforts to secure the designation of Sequoia and Kings Canyon as national parks. This book and his testimony before Congress played a vital role in the success of the effort, and Congress designated the area as a National Park in 1940.

During World War II Adams worked on creating epic photographic murals for the Department of the Interior.

In 1952 Adams was one of the founders of the magazine Aperture.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansel_Adams

William Christenberry - bio

photographer, painter and sculptor who works with personal and somewhat mythical themes growing out of his childhood experiences in Hale County, Alabama.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Christenberry

William Christenberry - subject

Another series of works was provoked by a terrifying incident when, out of curiosity, he tried to attend a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. Confronted at the door by a glaring masked figure, Christenberry fled. Though he destroyed his first two Klan paintings, the subject occupied him for many years, resulting in a dense multi-media construction adjacent to his studio that came to be known as the Klan Room, which was mysteriously burgled in 1979. Christenberry has largely reconstructed the room, which is filled with paintings, found objects, drawings, sculptures, dioramas, and a series of fabric dolls of klansmen in their hooded robes.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Christenberry

John Divola - artist statement

This body of work is based on some personal observations about photographs. I am fascinated by the concept of the photograph as an impression from, or remnant of, that which it describes. To stretch a metaphor - the photograph as an object has an relationship to that which it represents something like the relationship the snake skin has to the snake that sheds it. The relationship of something dead to something living. I would like to make images which are about opacity, muteness, and distance.

The subjects in this body of work are all signifiers of the natural, expression, and the sublime. The specific subjects are cyclones, rocks falling into or through water, animals, mountains, the woods, and phases of the moon. Further, all of these fabricated scenes involve the use of expressionistic gestures (e.g. brush strokes, splashing paint, staining, etc.). While this work may be rather self conscious, it is not my desire to illustrate a premise. Rather, these ideas are a basis for a subjective investigation and involvement. While these images are about distance and loss in relation to gestural and iconographic potential, they are equally about accident, gesture, process, and a melancholy faith. They are about both possibilities and limits.

Source: http://www.divola.com/

Robert Frank - bio

Frank was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Switzerland.Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his understanding of oppression. He turned to photography in part as a means to escape the confines of his business-oriented family and home, and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers. Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank

Robert Frank - subject

fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American society.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank

Robert Frank - process

In the 1970s he largely gave up "straight" photography to instead create narratives out of constructed images and collages, incorporating words and multiple frames of images that were directly scratched and distorted on the negatives.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank

Masahia Fukase - cultural role

Masahisa Fukase is considered to be both a legend and an enigma in his native Japan. For a culture that is traditionally reluctant to expose emotion in public, the expressionistic character of Fukase's work was, in part, the result of the development of the generation that evolved after WWII.

masahisa fukase's best known work was made while reeling from loss of love. after thirteen years of marriage, his wife yoko left him. while on a train returning to his hometown of hokkaido, perhaps feeling unlucky and ominous, fukase got off at stops and began to photograph something which in his culture and in others represents inauspicious feeling: ravens. he became obsessed with them, with their darkness and lonlieness. his photographs capture them midflight; crouched in trees at dusk with glowing eyes; and singularly and spectacularly depressingly dead, in cold deep snow. in the forward to the book published of this work, akira hasegawa writes, "masahisa fukase's work can be deemed to have reached its supreme height; it can also be said to have fallen to its greatest depth. the solitude revealed in this collection of images is sometimes so painful that we want to avert our eyes from it."

His images often incorporate fragments with erotic and mysterious undertones, building narrative meaning through contextualization and surreal juxtaposition.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Gibson

Debra Goldman - themes

Heinecken used photography's "illusion of reality" to address issues related to the popular media, consumerism, common sexual concerns of the 1960s, and the Vietnam War.

his collages juxtaposing disparate photographs from fashion and popular magazines made extraordinary, satirical statements about the values of contemporary society and the messages being pumped-out to the masses.

In the 1960s, Heinecken began to develop an approach to photographs that was distinctive in the history of the medium. He sometimes described himself as a para-photographer, because his work stood 'beside' or 'beyond' traditional ideas associated with photography. Essentially, the artist decided that in the wake of the media explosion that had come to characterize contemporary life, enough photographs already existed. Rather than make more, he would manipulate existing ones.

I am interested in what I term gestalts, picture circumstances which bring together disparate images or ideas so as to form new meanings and new configurations.

Source: http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/heineken_robert.php

Robert Heinecken - theme

Heinecken plays with mixed messages and double-talk to confront us with images of vanity and consumption that reveal the construction and superficiality of media culture.

Source: http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/heineken_robert.php

Beatrice Helg - method

With simple materials – light, frosted glass, sheets of rusted metal, blocks of concrete and architectural drawings – Béatrice Helg constructs her images for the camera and creates the illusion of monumental spaces.

Source: http://www.promethee.asso.fr/what/resilience/bioHelg.htm

Beatric Helg - theme

Sculpture or ephemeral architecture, her photographs have a spiritual quality and make a case for calm, harmony and equilibrium.

Source: http://www.promethee.asso.fr/what/resilience/bioHelg.htm

David Hockney - process

worked with photography, or more precisely - photomontage. Using varying numbers (~5-150) of small polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. Because these photos are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work which has an affinity with Cubism.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hockney

David Hockney - bio

English artist, based in Los Angeles, California. An important contributor to the British Pop Art of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hockney

David Hockney - theme

Make work consistent with human vision

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hockney

Yasuhiro Ishimoto - influence on art world

he brought a unique foreigner's perspective to a traditional American city, always focusing on classic American subjects. But perhaps more importantly, he brought back to Japan the essential philosophy and techniques of modern photography, affecting all photography in Japan since the Second World War.

Source: http://www.laurencemillergallery.com/ishimotolist.htm

Yasuhiro Ishimoto - theme

recent photography has dealt with the transitory nature of life

Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/yasuhiro-ishimoto

Yasuhiro Ishimoto - bio

Though he was born in San Francisco in 1921, Yasuhiro Ishimoto spent most of his childhood in Japan, returning to the United States in 1939. After World War II he studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design (founded as the “New Bauhaus” in the 1930s) in Chicago, and became a leading modernist.

He moved back to Japan in the 1960s to teach photography and has resided there since, earning acclaim as a major figure of his generation. This selection of recent work concentrates on his evocative, abstract studies of clouds, leaves, and footprints.

Source: http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2000/10/21/27608.html

Sean Kernan - The Secret Books

The Secret Book is a dialoguo between the writings of Jorge Luis Borges fascinating stories about endless libraries, books with shifiting contents, and characters who discover themselves. It contains 42 tritone photographs, three stories, several poems and quotations, together with an essay by the artist.

Levinthal has continued to collect and photograph toys, models and historical figurines. In both elaborate and simple tableaux, he recreates actual and mythical histories that reveal how we construct cultural narrative.

Source: http://www.davidlevinthal.com/article_speer.html

David Levinthal - method

Here the transformative power of photography, emphasized by the photographer's use of selective focus and lighting, turns toys into seemingly life-sized figures that resonate with a wide range of interpretative possibilities.

Source: http://www.davidlevinthal.com/article_speer.html

Mark Klett - bio

Trained as a geologist, Mark Klett established his artistic perspective on the Western American landscape as the chief photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project (1977-79), which rephotographed scenes visited by the first photographic surveys of the West in the 1860s and 1870s.

Source: http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/klett_mark.php

Mark Klett - themes

photographic exploration of the passage of time mapping the changing landscape and the decisive moments created by the detritus of human civilization, geological forces and the point of view of the photographer himself.

Source: http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/5aa/5aa174.htm

Davide Mosconi - theme

desperate "fixed" objects; series of polaroids expose the unstable "Real" extension between each object.

Still life has sometimes been spoken of as a small art form, insignificant compared to the grand traditions of portrait, religious, and history painting or 20th century statements tendered as huge abstract and/or expressionist canvases, not to mention the exotic or the all too terribly real transfixed in the camera's eye. Yet still life remains. Sometimes it is a vehicle for learning, but I suggest that its persistence has to do with its proximity to the most basic concerns of human life: food; shelter; sex and accompanying life and growth; and death. Also, the simplicity of content in a still life allows for endless expressive experimentation within a form which remains close to universal human experience.

Source: http://oliviaparker.com/gallery2/

Olivia Parker - composits

Heraclitus said: “All is flux-nothing is stationary”. I am interested in changes in ideas, the continual reshaping of our mental map of the world as we know it. What is real? What is fiction? What is the relationship between the two?

Source: http://oliviaparker.com/gallery5/

Eugene Richards - bio

Richards grew up on the gritty streets of Dorchester, MA, a place he says he never quite got used to because everyone was supposed to be afraid of everyone else. He wasn't and it shows.

"You deal with so much bitterness and anger and brutality on the street," Richards explains. "And you come home, and you have someone who loves you and cares for you and you have a child-- the world looks so much better to you."

Fazal Sheikh is an artist-activist who uses photography to create a sustained portrait of different communities around the world, addressing their beliefs and traditions, as well as their political and economic problems. By establishing a context of respect and understanding, his photographs demand we learn more about the people in them and about the circumstances in which they live.

Source: http://www.fazalsheikh.org/

Fazal Sheikh - bio

Fazal Ilahi Sheikh was born in New York City in 1965. His father, Abdul Majied Sheikh, was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1941. His grandfather, Sheikh Fazal Ilahi, was born in 1900 in the part of Northern India which since partition in 1947, has been Pakistan. This family thread has drawn Fazal Sheikh across three continents, back to the places where his father's family and his grandfather's family lived long before he was born. And in the attempt to uncover his own family, history, he has been thrust into the lives and contemporary conflicts of those people, many of them refugees from civil war, who have settled, however temporarily, in those countries today.

He works within several traditions from the documentary to postmodern discourse. As an artist, Stone approaches the medium with ideas from the spectrum of the history of photography. His work extends and challenges traditions, which are entering into the new potentials of digital print technologies.

Hew New England upbringing gave her a fascination with environments, which is still reflected in her evocative work today. Turbeville moved to New York City before she was 20. She was an editor at Harper's BAZAAR and Mademoiselle, then as a photographer whose photos have appeared in several fashion magazines.

Her signature style, of creating unique narratives is poetic and timeless.

Source: http://www.motionpicturegroup.com/turbeville1

Carrie Mae Weems - quote

My responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specificity of our historical moment."

Source: http://www.alpertawards.org/archive/winner96/weems.html

Carrie Mae Weems - themes

Weems produces art that addresses formal and political issues encircling African-American culture and focuses on the ways in which images shape our perception of color, gender and class. She explores existing genres of photography, particularly documentary imagery, and manipulates these conventions with complexity and wit. Whether focusing on personal or cultural history, on Africa or on traces of the Diaspora, Weems' interest in the narratives implied in photographs presses further through the use of cluster and sequence. Using narrative as a counterpoint to imagery, she recounts stories and myths and invents texts. Provocatively, she moves marginalized voices smack into the middle of contemporary discourse.

Source: http://www.alpertawards.org/archive/winner96/weems.html

Jo Whaley - influence

Her theater experience openly informs her photography, in which she creates stage sets and employs numerous props, painted backdrops and dramatic lighting. All of her photographic series fuse the language of photography with the language of painting and rely on an expressive use of color.

Source: http://www.jowhaley.com/Text_page.cfm?pID=182

Jo Whaley - themes

Working in discreet series, the subject matter of her photographs over the last 25 years have ranged from allegorical nudes, to a revision of the "vanitas" still life tradition, to a fusion of natural history and environmental issues in the Entomology Portfolio of insects. The compelling issue, that has driven her work, is the interface between nature and urban technological culture. With an ironic and quirky point of view, she juxtaposes organic and manmade elements to reflect the issue of environmental degradation in an imaginative manner.

Source: http://www.jowhaley.com/Text_page.cfm?pID=182

Joel-Peter Witkin - process

If photography is the art of fixing a shadow, glass is the medium that transfers shadows onto film. For Joel-Peter Witkin, whose elaborate tableaux reverberate with the extreme conditions of life and death, glass holds powerful associations. "Oldenberg," says Witkin, "once described glass as 'lightning trapped in sand.' "

His work often deals with such themes as death, corpses (or pieces of them) and various outsiders such as dwarfs, transsexuals, hermaphrodites and physically deformed people. His complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or famous classical paintings. Because of the transgressive nature of the contents of his pictures, his works have been labeled exploitative and have sometimes shocked public opinion. His art was often marginalized because of this challenging aspect.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel-Peter_Witkin

Joel-Peter Witkin - process

He employs a highly intuitive approach to the physical process of making the photograph, including scratching the negative, bleaching or toning the print, and an actual hands-in-the-chemicals printing technique. This experimentation began after seeing a 19th-century ambrotype of a woman and her ex-lover who had been scratched from the frame.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel-Peter_Witkin

Polaroid Polapan 4X5 film Type 52

Polaroid 52 Film (Reference #2986)

52 Film is a high-speed, medium-contrast, wide tonal range 4 x 5 inch sheet film for detailed black & white prints. It has gradual tonal range for excellent highlight and shadow detail and has the widest grayscale available from any Polaroid instant film.

Features :
High-speed
Gradual tonal range
Excellent highlight and shadow detail
The widest grayscale available from any Polaroid instant film

The Polaroid SX-70 is a folding SLR Polaroid pack film camera first introduced in 1972 by the Polaroid Corporation and produced in various iterations up until the early 1980s. The SX-70 accomplished several things:

SX-70s are famous because the SX-70 film takes a long time to "fix" or set permanently. Normally you would think this would be a Bad Thing™ and indeed Polaroid released the "Time-Zero" quick-fixing film soon afterwards. But the beauty of the slow-fixing SX-70 film is that there is plenty of time (2-3 days if you judiciously cool/reheat it) to make Polaroid manipulations.